With current cable television VoD technology known to the inventors herein, cable customers are typically limited to viewing video content that is predetermined by the cable provider and made generally available to all of that cable provider's VoD customers (or at least all of a particular class of that cable provider's VoD customers). With this technology, the VoD system typically presents the customer with a menu that lists the predetermined VoD content options (e.g., movies and television programming provided by the major television networks, cable stations, and pay per view (PPV) providers). From this list, the customer can select a particular item of predetermined VoD content for viewing on the customer's television through a set top box (STB).
Furthermore, digital personal video recorder (PVR) technology has recently reached the television viewing market and is expected to experience explosive future growth. With PVR technology, television viewers are provided with, among other things, (1) the ability to digitally record and store television programming for later playback, (2) the ability to flexibly define what television programming is to be recorded and stored for later playback, and (3) the ability to “pause” and “rewind” “live” television broadcasts. PVR technology typically comes in two modes, (1) a “client-side” PVR wherein an enhanced customer STB performs the recording and storage of programming locally, and (2) a “server-side” PVR wherein the recording and storage of programming is performed by hardware and software located in the cable company's head end.
To the best of the inventors' knowledge, customers who use conventional VoD systems, client-side PVR, or server-side PVR are still limited by the degree to which they can “personalize” the content to be played on their televisions through the cable company system. That is, with these systems, customers are limited to recording and storing only the predetermined content made available to them via the major TV networks, cable stations, and PPV providers.
Some cable company systems provide a degree of freedom in the content that their customers can view on their televisions via those cable company systems' respective broadband Internet services, which can be generally referred to as “cable Internet” systems. With conventional cable Internet systems, a cable modem termination system (CMTS) located in a cable head end functions to interface the cable company head end with the Internet. When providing Internet content to a cable customer, the CMTS (1) receives packets from the Internet having an Internet protocol (IP) payload, (2) encapsulates those packets in an MPEG header appropriate to the cable system, and (3) forwards the MPEG encapsulated packet of IP content to either a cable modem associated with that customer (to view the content on that customer's PC) or an enhanced STB associated with that customer (to view the content on that customer's television).
The cable modem is typically in communication with the customer's PC and operates to remove the MPEG headers from received packets so that the received packets can be processed using standard Internet applications such as web browsers and the like. The enhanced STB is configured with specialized hardware and/or software to reformat the IP content payloads of the received packets to a format suitable for display on the customer's television (e.g., MPEG2 or the like). Such an STB can be referred to as an “Internet-enabled STB”. The Internet-enabled STBs used in cable Internet systems are also often configured with a variety of hardware and/or software applications related to VoD technology and the like, as shown in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,850,218, the entire disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein.
Such cable Internet systems as described above suffer from shortcomings because the enhanced STBs required by such systems for customers to view Internet content on their televisions are costly to design, manufacture, implement, and maintain. As new STBs are designed and put into use, cable providers must maintain a field service staff dedicated to deploying the new STBs in the thousands/millions of homes served by that cable provider. As new functionality is added to those STBs, a similarly burdensome retrofit program would need to be deployed. Likewise, maintenance issues with enhanced Internet-enabled STBs creates staffing, cost, and customer service-related problems for cable providers.
As such, a need is felt in the art for improvements to cable systems wherein greater integration is provided between the functionality provided by VoD systems and the functionality provided by Internet services and wherein a greater degree of freedom over content choices is provided to customers. Furthermore, it is believed that there is a large percentage of the population who do not have broadband Internet access (or even computers) but do have cable television service that provides VoD service through a STB.
In view of the foregoing, the inventors herein believe that a need exists in the art for a cable system capable of providing Internet-based content, particularly personalized customer-specific Internet-based content, to cable television customers for display on their televisions independently of whether those customers subscribe to an Internet service and independently of whether those customers' STBs are Internet-enabled.
In an effort to fill these needs in the art, the inventors herein disclose a system and a method for delivering personalized content to customers of a subscription television service for display on their televisions, this system and method (a) converts Internet-based content from an Internet based format to a format suitable for display on a customer's television through a customer's set top box, and (b) after the conversion, delivers the converted content to a set top box associated with that customer for display on that customer's television. With the present invention, the customer's set top box need not be Internet-enabled.
Preferably, the subscription television service is a cable television service and the conversion is performed by a conversion and playback system located with a cable-head end. The content is preferably multimedia content such as video. Furthermore, the delivering step preferably comprises delivering the content to that customer's set top box in response to processing of a request from the customer submitted through a cable provider's video-on-demand system.
The present invention also preferably further comprises retrieving the Internet-based content from an Internet-based storage system having a messaging address associated with the customer, the retrieved content having an Internet-based data format. The Internet-content can be periodically pushed or pulled from the customer's messaging address within the storage system to a cable company's head end.
The present invention may further (a) associate the customer messaging address with an identifier for the customer's set top box, (b) determine the identifier for the customer's set top box at least partially from the request, and (c) responsive to the content request, select content retrieved from the customer messaging address that is associated with the determined identifier for display on the customer's television through the customer's set top box.
These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be in part apparent and in part pointed out in the following description and referenced figures